Metaphors of Economic Risk: Use of Investment and Gamble in Contemporary American Contexts
Corpora can identify culture specific uses of words and their consequent meaning (Fillmore, 1992). Conceptual metaphors have been shown to determine thought and are, in turn, determined by culture (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). This paper is centered on investigating the metaphorical background and conceptual metaphors used to produce the seemingly contradictory perceptions of the stock market being a gamble and the stock market being an investment within an American context. Through the study of two corpora, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008) and the Motley Fool Stock Advisor Newsletter (Ralph, 2008), the concepts behind perceptions of equity markets are explored. The principle questions investigated are: what similarities and differences in perceptions of investment and gamble can influence the conceptual metaphors governing notions pertaining to the stock market; how do conceptual metaphors differ over time within American contexts. Herein, this dichotomy is argued to be principally composed of two conceptual metaphors, Time is Money and Money is a Liquid; the latter applies to tangible instances of investment and gamble and the former applies to abstract instances of each word in relation to the stock market. This study finds that the subcategorical conceptual metaphors The Stock Market is an Investment and The Stock Market is a Gamble axe active at different times: 1) to make known ideas of time and distance regarding the stock market; 2) to make distinctions of measurement and containment about the stock market
corpus conceptual metaphor economy risk stock market
Richard Konopka Shelley Ching-yu Hsieh
Department of Applied Foreign Languages and Literature National Cheng Rung University
国际会议
2009 International Conference on Applied Linguistics & Language Teaching(2009应用语言学暨语言教学国际研讨会)
台湾
英文
342-352
2009-04-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）